As a collector of tarot and oracle decks, storage is always a problem. I still don’t have the ideal solution. I wonder if I ever will. Part of my problem is not just keeping them somewhere but with hundreds of decks, how do I arrange them? By publisher? By theme? By type? Alphabetically?

Right now, I have ones that I like and use more often in a nice cabinet purchased for the sole purpose of storing my cards. Others, that I don’t use often or have mostly for reference as well as the foreign editions of my projects, are in the <shudder> basement in Rubbermaid ™ containers.

I keep decks in their original packaging if possible. If not, I put them into bags, either purchased, made myself, or made by friends. I keep the books that come with decks separately, with my other tarot books. They are on two different floors in the house and so not very handy.

And then there are the recent purchases that lay all over the house, wherever I happen to be looking at or playing with them. Sometimes I find a deck I’d forgotten about in a drawer or under a pile of books or newspaper clippings or pages torn out of magazines…or snacks.

How do you organize and store your decks? Show me your solutions, so I can either be inspired to emulate your stylish, organized ways…or know that I’m not alone in my shameful disorganization.

Reader Comments

Once you hit a certain number it can be a challenge as you want to have easy access without letting them invade your space.

For decks that are not a part of a book set (the $6 – $20 decks with a LWB) I store on a set of wooden shelves intended for compact disks (people still occasionally buy those right?). With that size of shelving you can generally fit two stacks of decks side by side per shelf. This makes all the decks easy to find right away and you can grab-n-go. For book and deck sets that are still in their original boxes I store them in a large chest and also on some extra closet shelf space I had. This is less grab-n-go as stacks are usually several decks deep but i can usually find a deck quickly.

I have found that I have the most success storing decks horizontally rather than vertically. This is especially true with Llewellyn decks because of the one-size-fits-all white boxes. Now hear me out – Llewellyn has published my favorite highest-rotation decks – I am a huge fan and I understand that the one-size-fits-all method means the books and and deck box fit snugly in the outer box but since the deck will be rolling around in the box laying it flat will keep the cards from warping.

While it’s nice to have everything well-organized a tarot collection needs a bit of the haphazard in its presentation or it will look sterile. This is easy to overcome by grouping decks of different sizes together, including the odd deck in a velvet pouch, adding some mystical tchocke like crystal clusters, bottles, or statuettes to the shelf, and then topping it all of with an attractive pointed witch’s hat on the top shelf arranged at a jaunty angle as if it was casually deposited there when you walked in. I’m not kidding

I just got this amazing chest from my mother in law. It is wooden and has a key and everything. Even better, When you want to open it you have to push the lock in whether it is locked or not so the kids cant even get into it!!! It opens up to two shelves and a trunk. It is ammmmmaaaazzzzzzing.

Multiply that by 20 and you get an idea of what my storage looks like! I don’t live in a house with books, I live in a library with a bedroom! There are even book cases in front of other book cases!
Yahhhhh!

Well since I stopped purchasing new decks, I have a limited supply of decks. I used to keep them all in wooden boxes, but I’ve moved away from that after listening to Dan Pelletier’s “The Process: The Way of the Tarot Reader”. Now I have a large basket, lined with cedar, lavendar, and sandlewood. The decks themselves are wrapped in bandanas, and have labels pinned to the outside of the bandanas. The basket holding all 30 decks then slides onto the shelf on my coffee table, so they’re easy to get at when giving a class, or sharing with a student that forgot to bring their deck to class.

I usually always have two decks with me, currently it’s the Robin Wood deck, and the Wildwood Tarot deck, which I rely on for readings. Both decks are wrapped in bandanas.

I keep mine in bags in wooden boxes in the space under my altar or in my nightstand drawer. I keep them in the original boxes with the LWB whenever possible. For the larger books, I keep the ones I use most often on a shelf built into my altar, and the others on a nearby shelf. I am about to run out of space and will need to find a way to accomodate them short of having another purge.

I feel you pain in finding storage solutions for everything. I collect cards to I was given a deck with nothing else but the Fools from 25 different decks. Some of those got framed. However, the remaining decks live in hat boxes.

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